[WIP] Building a world from tectonics onward

[MrBragg]

Thanks Ottehcnor! At some point I'll cobble together all the different pieces of the methods that I've written about into something that is at least largely coherent.

By way of an update, here's an alpha version of the neighboring continent with some method tweaks to avoid carving out giant river canyons in all the highlands.

[MrBragg]

Another continent is finally in an alpha state. With it, a hemisphere has a first pass of topography

[Turambar]

Another continent is finally in an alpha state. With it, a hemisphere has a first pass of topography

Well done! The level of topographical detail you get zooming in is very rich and realistic. I love it.

[Tiluchi]

As always this is amazing work! Your Wilbur maps have to be some of the most convincing I've ever seen, and hopefully you can post a tutorial at some point. If I have any minor quibble it would be that that southern continent doesn't quite fit in aesthetically with the northern two- I think particularly due to the irregular peninsula protruding northwards. On its own it's quite a nice-looking landform, but it makes it a bit harder to see how those three fit together (as based on your tectonic map it seems they were recently joined as one supercontinent. It's a very minor issue though, and I'm firmly in the "it's okay to move on if you've already put a lot of work into it" camp so I wouldn't worry about it too much unless you foresee some major reworking of the coastlines in the future anyway.

[MrBragg]

I'm firmly in the "it's okay to move on if you've already put a lot of work into it" camp

I increasingly find myself in that camp with you Your critique here is entirely legit; the part where these three were recently a single landmass was an addition that came after I had gotten somewhat attached to the general shapes. My post hoc rationalization for the many little bays and gulfs that don't really fit together is that they're just flooded continental crust. Not sure how plausible that is, but at the time it worked for my geologically challenged brain

And who knows, maybe when I finally finish a first pass of the topography things like this will start to irritate me and I'll get an itch to go back and change things...

[Charerg]

I have to say I'm a little bit jealous of how quickly you manage to build up the topography (compared to my own sluggish pace ), and very nice quality as well. I wonder if you use a similar approach to mine (start at a lower resolution), or do you just build up the topography in a single pass? Looking forward to seeing more!

[MrBragg]

Thanks Charerg! I mostly just use a single pass at the final resolution. I say "mostly" because I do do an initial pass at very low resolution where I mark off regions of "mountains", "lowlands", "really tall mountains", etc, but that's more of a sketch than an actual step in building. I've found this a good balance between wanting nice detail and being lazy

[MrBragg]

Another piece finally in an alpha state!

[Peter Toth]

As always, congrats on achieving such realism with your topography! I'm sometimes wonder if our methods have any similarities or common starting points. But if there's one thing I know for sure, your method is FAR superior over mine.

A question I've been wondering: When you determine your climate zones (I'm assuming near the end of your project), are you planning to reduce some of the erosion on some of your mountains where there is desert, or is the river flow / erosion already accounted for, assuming that you've already determined your basic climatology in advance? (In my case, I worked out the basic climate first, before detailing the topography, just to gauge where the river channels and erosion should be. When I'm finished the fine-tuning, however, I'm planning on doing a final run with ExoPlaSim using the T63 model, to finalize the climatology.

At any rate, keep at it, for I'm sure we're all looking forward to that final project!

Peter

[MrBragg]

Thanks for the kind words, Peter. I think there's definitely some similarity between our approaches, though it sounds like you have way more patience for Wilbur then I do Just about all of my work goes into getting the heightmap the way I want it in Gimp and Wilbur is just the final step to add the highest frequency details / rivers. In any case I quite like your results and always enjoy when you post something new.

Your question about climate is a good one since there's definitely feedback between topography and climate. Far back in this thread--after a few pretty disastrous initial attempts--I got a rough sketch of climates that seemed plausible given a rough idea of what the topography would be. Using that as a guide, I use partial opacity masks to tailor the amount of erosion applied in Wilbur when I do the detailed topography; e.g. wet areas use 100% opacity while putative deserts use something like ~25% opacity. It's an undeniably imperfect approach, and if I had infinite time and patience I could in theory iterate between topography and climate generation, though I'm hoping it captures things well enough to not be immediately offensive I'm also planning to dig into ExoPlaSim once my topography is sufficiently done, so I'll be very interested to see your results since you'll invariably get there before I do!